Turkey’s anti-intellectual crusade is pure Orwell

Turkey’s anti-intellectual crusade is pure Orwell

Turkey’s president was unwise to evoke Animal Farm when his attack on academics has eerie echoes of George Orwell’s novel, says Umut Özkirımli

It was one of those awkward moments.

“In Animal Farm”, said Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in his address to the parliamentary group of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) earlier this month, “George Orwell criticises an order where ‘some are more equal than others’, like the [international] order which restricts United Nations Security Council membership to five countries. Very meaningful indeed.”

Obviously, neither the president nor his speechwriters were aware what Orwell’s allegorical fable – a satire on the Russian Revolution and Stalinism – was criticising. Had they read the book, they would have probably refrained from any references to it for fear of evoking parallels between Erdoğan’s unabashedly authoritarian “New Turkey” and the farm run by Orwell’s pigs.